News: Upcoming Book Releases From The Amsterdam Tattoo Museum

The Amsterdam Tattoo Museum aims to be the home for the art and history of worldwide skin culture. Located in two 19th-century villas, it houses an extensive permanent exhibition about the tattooing of yesterday, today and tomorrow in all its aspects and forms.

Garyou Tensei: a drawing of a dragon comes alive with a dot in the eye.

This book contains a series of 108 hand-painted, traditional Japanese kaina, Japanese short-sleeve tattoo designs applied to the upper left and right arms.

All of the designs in this volume are by the young tattoo artist Yushi ‘Horikichi’ Takei
isbn: 9789491394072
hardcover, linnen with dust jacket
120 pages/ 26 x 37,5 cm
€125,00/$150.00
available November 2012

The Mingins Photo Collection

1288 Pictures of Early Western Tattooing from the Henk Schiffmacher Collection.

Rich Mingins (1916-1968) is considered to be one of the biggest tattoo-artists of all time. Not much is known about this enigmatic artist. He was a quiet man, smoking all the time while working in a small room in the back of his house at 59 Redfern Road, Harleston, in London, while his wife busied herself in the kitchen.

Mingins work was extremely popular at his time. His artistic work and custom designs were of high quality, and really stood apart from work of other tattooists.

isbn: 9789491394010
hardcover
320 pages/ 22 x 32,5 cm
€69,50/$89.00

Tattoos of the Floating World Ukiyo-e Motifs in the Japanese Tattoo by Takahiro Kitamura

This unique book by tattoo artist Takahiro Kitamura discusses the art of the Japanese tattoo in the context of Ukiyo-e, concentrating on the parallel histories of the woodblock print and the tattoo. Through high quality illustrations it shows that the Japanese tattoo is highly reliant on and linked to the woodblock print, and that it deserves a position among the other art forms.